# Characters and consistency

Period: 2022 – now · Era: 2022 · The Dawn

Keeping one face, one outfit and one voice from shot to shot.

The oldest problem in AI film is that the hero changes face between shots. The fixes ran from training a model on your character (DreamBooth and LoRA, 2022) to Midjourney's character reference (March 2024), to video models that take a character sheet (Kling Elements, December 2024), to image models that hold identity on their own (Nano Banana, 2025). By 2026 the sheet usually comes first, and most shots are generated from it.

## How it worked

1. **Make the character sheet first:** a turnaround and face close-ups in Nano Banana Pro, ChatGPT Image or Seedream.
2. **Use it as the reference for most shots,** in Seedance, Kling or Runway; tile the faces into one grid image when a model takes few references.
3. **Train a LoRA when nothing else holds,** on ten to fifteen images, for a face or an artist's drawn style.
4. **Keep the voice consistent too:** one cloned voice per character, or a voice reference pulled from a character clip.
5. **Check takes against the sheet** and throw away the near misses; consistency is a curation habit as much as a setting.

## Why it mattered

A film needs the same person in shot one and shot fifty. Until identity could be held, AI film was montage; once it could, it became storytelling with recurring characters, series and features.

## Tools of the era

- DreamBooth (2022): https://dreambooth.github.io
- LoRA for diffusion (2022): https://github.com/cloneofsimo/lora
- IP-Adapter (2023): https://github.com/tencent-ailab/IP-Adapter
- Midjourney character reference (2024): https://docs.midjourney.com
- Kling 1.6 Elements (2024): https://klingai.com
- Gen-4 References (2025): https://runway.com
- Nano Banana (2025): https://gemini.google
- Nano Banana Pro (2025): https://gemini.google
- Seedance 2.0 (2026): https://seed.bytedance.com/en/seedance

## Example videos and posts

- Consistent characters in Midjourney (--cref) · Curious Refuge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BO_TocisAc
- Consistent realistic characters with a Flux LoRA · Curious Refuge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdjDK3dSnDY
- The secret to AI character sheets · Theoretically Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-rlr3k-2TI
- Consistent characters step by step: Midjourney, Ideogram, Seedream, Seedance · Curious Refuge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsqhdm7c-Rc
- The face-grid character hack for Seedance · Curious Refuge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AVUM6AR1W8
- Consistent characters, voices and scenes: how A Game of Horse was made · Runway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swx780Vy_OQ

## On the timeline

- [Kitsune](https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/kitsune) (2025-01)

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Source: https://aifilmhistory.org/workflows/craft-characters